The Third Cornerstone: Economic Relations
The real wealth of nations consists of the contribution of its people and from the natural environment; it is not solely financial. Our current economic policies and systems are endangering our natural life-support systems; Earth’s ability to sustain itself. We need to create economic indicators, policies, and practices that give visibility and value to the most important human work; that of caring for people, beginning in childhood, and caring for natural environment. We need a caring economics.
We Need a New Way
Under present economic systems, both free market and centrally planned, the problems of underemployment, polarization of wealth, hardship, and suffering stemming from "structural adjustments" and other so-called globalization economic policies, are escalating. The gap between haves and have-nots is growing both between and within nations. Poverty is an intractable problem. And current economic policies are endangering our natural life-support systems. As is developed in Dr. Eisler’s book, The Real Wealth of Nations, we need a new way of visualizing and structuring economics.
The real wealth of nations is not financial, it consists of the contributions of people and nature. We therefore need what we have not had: economic indicators, policies, and practices that give visibility and value to the most important human work: the work of caring for people, beginning in childhood, and for nature. We need a caring economics.
Caregiving Work
To create the “high quality human capital” needed for the postindustrial information/knowledge we must recognize what both psychology and neuroscience tell us: that this capital largely depends on the kind of care children receive. We need strong social support for the caregiving work performed in the household economy.
There are important trends in this direction. For example, most Western European nations offer monetary assistance and increasingly also education for parenting, along with paid parental leave, health care, and high quality early childhood education. Satellite economic indicators are beginning to count the economic value of this work. For example, the Swiss government found that if it were included it would constitute 70 percent of the reported Swiss GDP.
But the general failure to give real value to this work in large part accounts for the fact that poverty and hunger have proven intractable. Indeed, it makes no sense to talk of hunger and poverty in generalities when the mass of the world's poor and the poorest of the poor are women and children. Even in the rich United States, women over the age of 65 are according to U.S. statistics twice as likely to be poor as mean over 65. Most of these women are, or were, caregivers. We need economic inventions that give visibility and value to this essential “women’s work” – whether it is performed by women or men.
Development policies also need to shift their focus to women. Many studies show that in most regions of the developing world women allocate far more of their resources to their families than men do. We must include the work of caring and caregiving still performed primarily by women worldwide into national and international systems of economic measurement and accounting.
Reward New Economic Inventions
We should encourage and reward economic and social inventions that give value to caring and caregiving work in both the market and non-market economic sectors. For example, we have national programs to train soldiers to effectively take life - and we have pensions for them. By contrast, we have no national programs for training women and men to effectively care for children - even though we have solid scientific knowledge about what is and is not effective and humane childcare.
People need meaningful work. The negative income tax or guaranteed income for doing nothing is no solution. Clearly the most important and meaningful work is that of caring for other humans, particularly our children and our growing elderly population, and for our natural environment.
Redefining productive work also imbues work with what it lacks in a dominator system - where it is primarily motivated by fear and the artificial creation of scarcities through wars and misallocation and misdistribution of resources. Giving value to caring and caregiving imbues work with meaning. It gives work a spiritual dimension, since at the core of all spiritual traditions is the valuing of compassion and love.
